Before Baseball: A Real Genealogy of the Game
Before Baseball: A Real Genealogy of the Game
Before Baseball: A Real Genealogy of the Game
From ancient ballplay to the modern diamond — separating deep prehistory, demonstrable ancestry, and institutional baseball
Baseball has no single birthday. That is the first fact a serious history of the game must accept. The old American creation stories — Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown, or Alexander Cartwright suddenly inventing baseball in 1845 — mistake codification for creation. The historical record instead reveals a layered genealogy: an immense human prehistory of ballplay; a narrower European family of bat-and-ball games from which recognizable baseball emerged; an American period of competing local forms; and, finally, the nineteenth-century conversion of a flexible folk game into a standardized, professional, commercial institution.[1][2]
The Venezuelan historian Juan Vené grasped one part of this unusually well. His governing phrase was that “nobody invented baseball, because it invented itself.” He later expanded that intuition into the book and lecture Cinco Mil Años de Béisbol. Vené traced baseball backward beyond Cartwright and eighteenth-century England to ancient ritual, including pharaonic Egypt, and in his earlier illustrated history treated pre-Columbian Mexican and Guatemalan ballplayers as participants in baseball’s deep past.[3][4] Taken literally as a continuous chain of descent, that thesis goes beyond the evidence. Taken as a theory of baseball’s deep prehistory — the recurrent human discovery of throwing, striking, catching, running, bases, teams, and ballplayers — it contains a powerful insight.
The most historically defensible genealogy therefore requires two lines to be kept distinct until the evidence allows them to meet: the deep history of human ballplay, and the documentable ancestry of baseball. The first is ancient and global. The second becomes traceable in Europe and, by the eighteenth century, unmistakably leads toward the game that Americans would transform into baseball.
I. Deep Prehistory: The Ballplayer Before Baseball
Human beings played with balls long before anyone played baseball. This statement sounds obvious, but it changes the scale of the inquiry. If the subject is merely the codified sport, the story can begin in the nineteenth century. If the subject is the cultural form assembled inside baseball — projectile, striker, runner, catcher, contested space, repetition, ritual, spectatorship, heroic performance — then the prehistory becomes much older.
Ancient Egypt provides one of the most provocative examples. Egyptologist Peter A. Piccione has studied the ritual known as seker-hemat, or “batting the ball.” A relief associated with Pharaoh Thutmose III, around 1460 BCE, depicts the king striking balls in a ritual setting. Piccione argues that Egyptian ballplay existed much earlier and that a recreational practice could be incorporated into royal and religious ritual. He explicitly warns against the crude conclusion that Egyptians “invented American baseball”; his narrower point is that Egyptian bat-and-ball activity prefigured certain physical and symbolic features later found in baseball.[5]
This distinction is essential. There is no established documentary or archaeological chain carrying seker-hemat from Egypt through successive cultures into modern baseball. Vené sometimes described such a chain too confidently, saying that Egyptian rites spread through Europe and were transformed by the English into cricket, rounders, and ultimately baseball.[6] That is not demonstrated history. What Egypt establishes is something different and still important: striking a ball with an implement, catching or retrieving it, and investing the action with social or cosmological meaning are extraordinarily old human behaviors.
II. Mesoamerica: An Independent American Civilization of Ballplay
Mesoamerica gives the deep history of the ballplayer an even firmer archaeological foundation. The Metropolitan Museum of Art summarizes evidence for rubber balls from El Manatí on Mexico’s Gulf Coast dating to approximately 1600 BCE and a formal ballcourt at Paso de la Amada, in present-day Guatemala, dating to about 1400 BCE. Ballcourts, equipment, figurines, reliefs, and written or painted representations then document a vast and diverse ballgame tradition lasting for millennia among societies including the Maya, Veracruz cultures, Mixtec, and Aztec.[7]
There was no single timeless “Mesoamerican ballgame.” Forms varied by region and period. The famous hip-ball game used a heavy rubber ball struck primarily with the body, while other variants and associated practices could employ different equipment. The institution also exceeded recreation. Ballcourts could be political theaters and sacred spaces; ballplay could be linked to rulership, warfare, sacrifice, fertility, death, and cosmic order.[7]
The K’iche’ Maya Popol Vuh gives this world its most famous literary expression. The Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque enter a mythic sequence in which ballplaying is bound to confrontation with the Lords of Xibalba, death, ordeal, deception, defeat, and renewal. The myth does not make the Hero Twins “baseball players” in any historical sense. It demonstrates something more fundamental: in the Americas, the ballplayer had become a mythic and cosmological figure centuries before Europeans arrived.[7]
This is the background that makes Vené’s treatment of ancient Mexico intelligible. In his illustrated Historia del Béisbol, he labels archaeological figures with modern baseball vocabulary — “El Bateador” (The Batter), “El Lanzador” (The Pitcher), “Bravo Pitcher,” and “¡Va a Lanzar!” (He Is Going to Pitch) — and states that the Indigenous peoples of Mexico and Guatemala played something “very similar to baseball.” The comparison is morphologically suggestive but genealogically unproven. We should not turn a Mesoamerican figure into a pitcher merely because a pose resembles a modern delivery. Nor is there evidence that the Maya or Olmec ballgame was transmitted into the English-American game.
Yet excluding Mesoamerica entirely from a broad history of baseball would create another distortion. It would imply that the history of ballplaying in the Americas begins with European settlement. It does not. Long before the first English-language reference to “base-ball,” the Americas possessed sophisticated, institutional, spectacular, and sacred ball cultures. They are not demonstrable ancestors of baseball; they are its deep American prehistory — an independent lineage of the human ballplayer.
III. The Demonstrable Genealogy Begins in Europe
The evidentiary standard changes when we reach medieval and early modern Europe. Here we encounter not merely analogous ballplay but a family of games sharing features that can be followed toward baseball: a striker, a thrown or served ball, fielders, running, safe places or bases, and rules governing outs and scoring.
The Library of Congress describes early baseball as a variant within a broader medieval and early modern world of bat-and-ball games, including stoolball, old cat, and trap ball. Rules were local and flexible. Rather than imagining a single ancestor, the evidence suggests an ecosystem of related folk games that borrowed from, overlapped with, and diverged from one another.[1]
This is where modern scholarship has corrected another simplified origin story: baseball should not be described as merely “rounders brought to America.” David Block’s Baseball Before We Knew It argues from early documentary evidence that English baseball had an identity before rounders acquired its later name and form. His research rejects both the Doubleday myth and the neat rounders-to-baseball succession, replacing them with a more complicated history of related European games.[2]
IV. 1744: Baseball Exists Before America Invents It
The crucial documentary landmark is John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, first published in England in 1744. Its rhyme titled “Base-Ball” describes a struck ball, a boy running to a designated post, and returning home. The Library of Congress calls this evidence a direct refutation of the claim that baseball originated in the United States. An American edition appeared in 1787 and constitutes the first known printed American reference to baseball.[8]
The importance of 1744 is not that the pictured game is modern baseball. It plainly is not. The field, rules, equipment, and conventions were different. Its importance is categorical: a game called base-ball, organized around striking and running to posts, existed in England roughly a century before the Knickerbocker rules.
Vené was therefore right on the central point when he answered the Cartwright story by citing A Little Pretty Pocket-Book. Whatever happened in New York in the 1840s, it could not have been the creation of baseball ex nihilo.[3]
V. America Before the Diamond: A Family of Local Games
European bat-and-ball traditions crossed the Atlantic and entered a continent already rich in Indigenous ball cultures. In the English colonies and early United States, “playing ball” could mean different things in different places. Rules remained customary rather than universal.
By the mid-nineteenth century, the Library of Congress identifies two major competing American forms. The Massachusetts Game used a rectangular field and allowed a runner to be retired by being struck with a thrown ball. The New York Game used the diamond-shaped field and underhand pitching. Other local practices existed around them. Baseball at this stage was less a single sport than a related cluster of games.[1]
That fact explains why the search for one inventor fails. The modern game was produced by selection. Certain rules, field geometries, club practices, and competitive conventions survived; others disappeared.
VI. 1845–1858: Codification, Not Creation
The New York Knickerbockers’ rules of 1845 matter enormously, but they should be described accurately. They were a major act of codification within an existing baseball culture, not the creation of the game itself. SABR notes that the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club devised one of the earliest codified rule sets in 1845. In 1857, fifteen New York-area clubs convened and adopted almost all of those rules, helping turn one club’s conventions into the “New York rules.”[9]
This is the true importance of Cartwright’s era. Baseball begins to move from custom to text, from local agreement to interclub standard, and from a folk pastime toward an institution. Once clubs from different places must play one another, incompatible rules become a practical problem. Standardization becomes necessary.
The New York form ultimately defeated the Massachusetts form. The Library of Congress attributes its success partly to the Knickerbockers’ promotion and an enthusiastic press. What became “baseball” was therefore not merely the best-designed rule set winning naturally. It was also a product of networks, publicity, urban density, club organization, transportation, and cultural power.[1]
VII. Civil War, Railroads, and the Nationalization of the Game
The Civil War accelerated baseball’s geographic spread. The Library of Congress notes that soldiers carried the game in multiple directions during and after the war. By the late 1860s, baseball was becoming a national rather than merely northeastern institution.[10]
Transportation mattered just as much as rules. Railroads allowed clubs from distant cities to meet regularly. The Hall of Fame emphasizes that intercity play created pressure for standardized rules: a Cleveland club and a Cincinnati club could no longer comfortably maintain incompatible local systems once they were expected to compete.[11]
This is a decisive stage in the genealogy. Baseball becomes modern not simply because someone writes rules, but because a technological and commercial environment makes common rules useful. The railroad turns the local club into the traveling club; the traveling club creates larger competitive circuits; larger circuits produce spectators, press coverage, gate receipts, salaries, statistics, rivalries, and eventually leagues.
VIII. 1869–1876: The Folk Game Becomes an Industry
In 1869, Harry Wright’s Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first known openly professional baseball team. The club paid its players openly, toured extensively, and went undefeated against its principal opponents that season. The Hall of Fame treats Cincinnati’s professionalization as a watershed: enclosed grounds and gate receipts made salaries economically possible, while touring made the club and the game nationally famous.[12]
Professional baseball then moved rapidly toward durable league organization. The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players began play in 1871. In 1876, William Hulbert and other owners founded the National League, with eight charter clubs and a more centralized structure, standard contracts, rules, and disciplinary authority.[13]
At this point the genealogy has crossed a threshold. We are no longer dealing primarily with a folk game whose rules vary by community. Baseball has become an institution capable of defining membership, labor, territory, schedules, legitimacy, and exclusion.
IX. The Genealogy Must Include the Color Line
A complete genealogy of baseball cannot treat racial segregation as a later social issue appended to the “real” history of the game. The color line was part of the same institutionalization that made professional baseball powerful. As organizations acquired authority to define who could play, that authority could be used to exclude.
Black players participated in nineteenth-century baseball before the color line hardened. Moses Fleetwood Walker played for Toledo in the American Association in 1884; Bud Fowler built a long professional career; Frank Grant starred for Buffalo in the International League. SABR’s research on the 1887 International League season identifies Grant as perhaps the greatest Black player of the nineteenth century and records his extraordinary performance amid escalating racial hostility.[14]
In July 1887, the International League barred the signing of additional Black players. MLB’s historical overview identifies that action as a major institutional drawing of the color line; broader “gentlemen’s agreements” and segregationist practice subsequently excluded Black players from the white major leagues.[15]
Black baseball did not disappear. It developed parallel institutions, independent clubs, barnstorming networks, and eventually durable leagues. On February 13, 1920, Rube Foster and other owners founded the Negro National League in Kansas City, creating the first successful long-term Black professional league structure.[16]
The line was breached in the modern major leagues when Jackie Robinson debuted for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947.[17] Thus the institutional genealogy of baseball contains a terrible symmetry: the organizational power that made a national professional sport possible also made organized exclusion possible; later, organized action was required to dismantle it.
X. The Real Genealogy
The evidence therefore supports neither the old American creation myth nor an unbroken five-thousand-year chain from Egypt to Yankee Stadium. The real genealogy is layered:
• Deep human prehistory: ancient societies independently develop ballplay, throwing, striking, catching, running, ritual contest, spectatorship, and the social figure of the ballplayer.
• Ancient Egypt: documented ritual bat-and-ball activity demonstrates the antiquity of striking games, but no continuous line to baseball has been established.
• Ancient Mesoamerica: by at least the second millennium BCE, an independent American ballgame civilization develops courts, rubber balls, specialized players, political spectacle, and cosmological meaning. It is a deep American parallel, not a proven ancestor of modern baseball.
• Medieval and early modern Europe: a tangled family of stoolball, trap-ball, old-cat, cricket-related, base-running, and other bat-and-ball games supplies the demonstrable cultural environment from which baseball emerges.
• England, 1744: “Base-Ball” appears in print in A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, proving that baseball by name predates nineteenth-century American codification.
• Colonial and early national America: imported games diversify into local forms; custom remains stronger than standardization.
• 1840s–1850s: the New York game is codified and increasingly standardized through clubs and conventions. Cartwright’s generation organizes baseball; it does not create it.
• Civil War and railroad era: mobility, intercity competition, newspapers, and national networks spread and standardize the game.
• 1869–1876: open professionalism, gate revenue, touring, salaried players, and league government convert baseball into a durable industry.
• 1880s onward: institutional baseball constructs a racial color line; Black baseball develops its own powerful parallel institutions, culminating in the Negro Leagues.
• 1947 onward: integration reopens the major leagues, altering the institution again without ending baseball’s continual evolution.
XI. What Vené Saw — and Where We Must Correct Him
Juan Vené’s deepest insight survives historical correction. “Baseball invented itself” is not literally a mechanism, but it is an excellent description of cultural evolution. No single person conceived the entire game. Generations of players altered rules, equipment, field dimensions, pitching, batting, fielding, club organization, scheduling, professionalism, and competitive norms. The game emerged through accumulation, selection, borrowing, standardization, and conflict.[3]
Where Vené goes too far is transmission. In some formulations he turns resemblance into descent: Egyptian ritual becomes European play, which becomes cricket and rounders, which becomes baseball.[6] The surviving evidence does not justify so clean a chain. Similar actions can arise independently. A person striking a moving object with a stick in Egypt, a Mesoamerican ritual ballplayer, and an English child playing base-ball need not belong to one continuous tradition.
But the correction should not force us back into the narrow nineteenth-century origin myth. The better formulation is that baseball has both an ancestry and a prehistory. Its ancestry is the traceable European-American family of bat-and-ball games. Its prehistory is the far older human history of balls, sticks, throwing, striking, running, contest, ritual, and the ballplayer as social type.
Conclusion: Baseball as an Emergent Form
The real history of baseball is therefore neither five thousand years old nor one hundred eighty years old. Those numbers answer different questions.
The codified New York game belongs to the middle of the nineteenth century. Baseball by name is documented in eighteenth-century England. Its demonstrable ancestors belong to a much older European ecology of bat-and-ball games. Its deepest constituent behaviors reach into antiquity. And in the Americas, long before modern baseball arrived, Mesoamerican civilizations had already made ballplay into architecture, spectacle, political theater, sacred ritual, and myth.
The correct genealogy does not need to pretend that an Olmec or Maya ballplayer was secretly playing baseball. Nor does it need to exile that ballplayer from the story. The ancient Mesoamerican player belongs to the prehistory of what baseball means in the Americas: the human being confronting a ball, a bounded field, other bodies, rules, chance, skill, danger, spectators, and meanings larger than the immediate play.
Modern baseball arose when one branch of this immense human propensity became historically specific: European bat-and-ball traditions crossed the Atlantic, proliferated into American local games, were codified by clubs, standardized by competition, spread by war and rail, monetized by gates, professionalized by salaries, governed by leagues, distorted by racial exclusion, enriched by Black baseball’s independent institutions, and transformed again by integration.
That is why the most accurate origin story has no inventor standing at its center. Baseball is an emergent cultural form. It was made by thousands of unnamed players before it was governed by famous men; it existed in variant forms before anyone could define its official form; and it continues to change after every supposed point of completion. Vené’s phrase, stripped of the genealogical leaps his evidence cannot sustain, remains an unusually good epitaph for the invention myth: baseball was not invented once. It became.
Notes and Sources
1. Library of Congress, “Baseball’s Roots,” Baseball Americana. The LOC describes early baseball as one variant among medieval and early modern bat-and-ball games and distinguishes the Massachusetts and New York games. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/baseball-americana/about-this-exhibition/origins-and-early-days/baseballs-roots/
2. David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game (University of Nebraska Press, 2005; new ed. 2025). Publisher/JSTOR descriptions summarize Block’s documentary challenge to the Doubleday and simple rounders-origin stories. https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496242693/baseball-before-we-knew-it/ ; https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1dnncnb
3. Juan Vené, “Henry Chadwick no inventó al beisbol,” Milenio, Jan. 31, 2017. Vené states: “nadie inventó el beisbol, porque se inventó a sí mismo,” and cites the 1744 English evidence. https://www.milenio.com/opinion/juan-vene/en-la-pelota/henry-chadwick-no-invento-al-beisbol
4. Juan Vené, Cinco Mil Años de Béisbol (Ediciones B, Caracas, 2006/2007), ISBN 978-980-6993-15-0. CERLALC catalog record; Vené later directed readers to the book for his full Egyptian-origin argument. https://cerlalc.org/wp-content/uploads/publicaciones/olb/PUBLICACIONES_OLB_Catalogo-de-autores-y-libros-de-America-Latina-vol-2_v1_010108.pdf ; https://www.latinosports.com/what-ruth-clemente-and-pete-rose-were-charging-lo-que-cobraban-ruth-clemente-y-pete-rose/
5. Peter A. Piccione, “Batting the Ball (seker-hemat),” College of Charleston. Piccione discusses Egyptian bat-and-ball ritual and explicitly distinguishes resemblance/prefiguration from an assertion that Egypt invented American baseball. https://piccionep.people.charleston.edu/sekerhemat2.html
6. Juan Vené’s stronger transmission claim appears in his column answering a reader about Egyptian rites: he describes batting, running and fielding for Osiris, then says the practice became popular in Europe and was transformed in England into cricket and rounders before American forms became baseball. This should be treated as Vené’s thesis, not established scholarly consensus. https://www.el-carabobeno.com/solo-siete-pelotazos-dio-mariano-rivera/
7. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “The Mesoamerican Ballgame.” The Met gives the El Manatí rubber-ball evidence (1600 BCE), Paso de la Amada ballcourt (1400 BCE), regional variation, and the game’s religious/political meanings. https://www.metmuseum.org/essays/the-mesoamerican-ballgame
8. Library of Congress, “A Little Pretty Pocket Book.” The 1744 English original contains the rhyme “Base-Ball”; the 1787 American edition is identified by LOC as the first printed American reference to baseball. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/baseball-americana/about-this-exhibition/origins-and-early-days/baseballs-roots/a-little-pretty-pocket-book/
9. Society for American Baseball Research, “September 9, 1858: The New York rules in New England.” SABR discusses the 1845 Knickerbocker codification and the 1857 convention of New York-area clubs. https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/september-9-1858-the-new-york-rules-in-new-england/
10. Library of Congress, “Origins and Early Days,” Baseball Americana. LOC notes the spread of baseball during and after the Civil War and the emergence of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/baseball-americana/about-this-exhibition/origins-and-early-days/
11. National Baseball Hall of Fame, “Advent of regional rail service made baseball possible.” The Hall connects intercity rail travel with pressure for common rules and the rise of professional baseball. https://baseballhall.org/discover/advent-of-regional-rail-service-made-baseball-possible
12. National Baseball Hall of Fame, “Pro baseball began in Cincinnati in 1869.” The Hall identifies the Red Stockings as the first known openly professional team and explains the economic role of enclosed grounds, gate receipts and salaries. https://baseballhall.org/discover/pro-baseball-began-in-cincinnati-in-1869
13. National Baseball Hall of Fame, “Guide to the National League Meetings, Conferences, and Financial Ledgers” and William Hulbert biography. The National League was founded Feb. 2, 1876, with eight charter clubs and centralized policies. https://baseballhall.org/research/finding-aid/ba-mss-55 ; https://baseballhall.org/hall-of-famers/hulbert-william
14. Robert Peterson, “Out at Home: Baseball Draws the Color Line, 1887,” Society for American Baseball Research. The article documents Frank Grant’s Buffalo career and the racial crisis of the 1887 International League season. https://sabr.org/journal/article/out-at-home-baseball-draws-the-color-line-1887/
15. MLB, “History of Black Baseball Part One.” MLB’s historical overview identifies July 14, 1887, as the International League’s drawing of a color line against new Black signings and describes the subsequent exclusionary system. https://www.mlb.com/news/featured/history-of-black-baseball-part-one
16. National Baseball Hall of Fame, “The Negro National League is Founded.” Rube Foster and fellow owners founded the NNL in Kansas City on Feb. 13, 1920. https://baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/inside-pitch/negro-national-league-is-founded
17. National Baseball Hall of Fame, Jackie Robinson materials. Robinson debuted for Brooklyn on April 15, 1947, integrating the modern major leagues. https://baseballhall.org/discover/shortstops/a-page-in-time ; https://baseballhall.org/The-Black-Baseball-Initiative/We-Play-landing
Selected Bibliography
Block, David. Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game. University of Nebraska Press, 2005; new edition, 2025.
Library of Congress. Baseball Americana: Origins and Early Days.
Metropolitan Museum of Art. “The Mesoamerican Ballgame.”
Piccione, Peter A. “Batting the Ball (seker-hemat).” College of Charleston.
Society for American Baseball Research. Research on early baseball, the New York rules, and the 1887 color line.
National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Research articles and archival guides on professionalization, the National League, Black baseball, and integration.
Vené, Juan. Cinco Mil Años de Béisbol. Caracas: Ediciones B, 2006/2007.
Vené, Juan. “En la Pelota” columns on baseball’s origins and the thesis that the game “invented itself.”